BOOKS: Imprisoned by the Past: Warren McCleskey and the American Death Penalty

A new book by Prof. Jeffrey Kirchmeier of the City University of New York exam­ines the recent his­to­ry of race and the death penal­ty in the U.S. The book uses the sto­ry of a Georgia death row inmate named Warren McCleskey, whose chal­lenge to the state’s death penal­ty went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1987 the Court held (5 – 4) that his sta­tis­ti­cal evi­dence show­ing that Georgia’s sys­tem of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was applied in a racial­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate way was insuf­fi­cient to over­turn his death sen­tence. McCleskey was even­tu­al­ly exe­cut­ed. The book con­nects this indi­vid­ual case to the broad­er issue of racial bias in the American death penal­ty. Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said of the book,“No legal deci­sion in the last half of the 20^th cen­tu­ry char­ac­ter­ized America’s con­tin­u­ing fail­ure to con­front its his­to­ry of racial inequal­i­ty more than the McCleskey deci­sion. Jeff Kirchmeier’s wel­comed and insight­ful book brings much need­ed con­text and per­spec­tive to this crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant issue. Compelling and thought­ful, this book is a must read for those try­ing to under­stand America’s death penal­ty and its sor­did rela­tion­ship to our fail­ure to over­come three cen­turies of racial injustice.”

(Press release, Oxford University Press: J. Kirchmeier, ​“Imprisoned by the Past: Warren McCleskey and the American Death Penalty,” 2015; Stevenson quote at amazon.com’s book post­ing; DPIC post­ed, Feb. 5, 2015). See Books, Race, and History of the Death Penalty.